Somebody had to bring that up didn’t they. A guy abuses a diagrammatic convention only once, all hell breaks loose and they never let him forget it. Hasn’t he suffered enough? Won’t somebody think of his children?

My (admittedly layman’s) undertanding is that you are hard-pressed to have a functional eukaryotic metabolism without ~50% commonality with just about everything else that does(especially if the percentage numbers only count nuclear DNA, and thus obfuscate the difference between things with mitochondria and things with chloroplasts…)

It’s actually pretty remarkable how much of the genome codes essential-but-boring life support functions, and how little appears to be at play for the sophisticated, high-level functions that get the philosophers worked up…

Musa Acuminata (Cavendish) is the common banana most of us are used to in the grocery in the US. Actually it’s usually a hybrid Musa acuminata × balbisiana, not shown here. A fruit with almost as much blood on its hands as the catholic church…

Yes. What this is is a six-way Venn diagram showing the distribution of shared gene families across multiple plant genomes, including banana, which has just been sequenced. The take home message is that while many families are universal (no surprise), there is a surprisingly large number of families (2809, center upper left), specific to the Poaceae, the family of plants that include banana, rice, and sorghum.

It doesn’t work that way in science — you don’t have many authors because a paper is long — you have many authors because it look that many scientists to get the results. Besides, this is in Nature, which has strict limits on the length of articles — which means that most of the actual data and analysis is hidden in the “supplemental information” and the paper itself almost an abstract.

First, there must be some sort of meta-message behind all of these banana posts from Cory. A secret code, perhaps, wrapped up in the first character of the image’s metadata or something more/less technical.